Liz Greene Tag

July 7, 2022 In Astrology, Relationship By Ingrid Hoffman

Earthed—Mars in Taurus—July 5th-August 20th

Nature will always take what is too high and bring it down to earth—Toko-pa Turner.

As swallows swoop low over the meadows salt licked by an Atlantic breeze, the long languorous days of summer melt into copper sunsets. Across the dry earth, a hairline crack gains momentum as tenacious Mars muscles into earthy Taurus this week. This ancient deity of battle, who unlike the invisible sky gods, was embodied and fought on the earth plane, carries our personal and collective fighting instinct, and in Taurus Mars takes on a certain fixity and dogged determination. We all have Mars (in different signs, fighting different battles) in our birth chart, an energy that expresses itself as assertion or desire, or becomes pathologized as depression. In our culture, Mars is expressed in the competition of sport, the violence of computer gaming, the carnage and cruelty of war, the impotence of mass shootings. As Mars tipped from Aries into Taurus on the 4^th of July, a gunman opened fire in Chicago. Mass shootings account for just a fraction of the daily toll of firearm deaths in the US, where about 124 people die every day in other acts of gun violence, according to research by the Marshall Project.

This week, in Copenhagen, a gunman killed three people in a shopping centre. Something much deeper is at work as the unresolved collective issue with Mars affects us all.

This month, Mars joins forces with erratic Uranus edging ever nearer to a close encounter with the North Node (18° Taurus) between July 31^st and August 1^st as tipping points topple in our own lives and collectively. A belligerent Mars continues to pick a fight between July 22^nd and August 15^th while Uranus remains within only a few degrees of the North Node until February 2023. The North Node in Taurus reflects our collective yearning for stability and calm, our ancient rootedness in the earth (Taurus) while the South Node in Scorpio tugs us back regressively to the messy intensity of unresolved karma which, in Scorpio’s deep waters, will never be light or superficial.

We’re being asked to excavate those parts of ourselves that may feel like unwelcome guests – those uncomfortable feelings that still fester, those tender places in our heart that are so easily bruised, those regrettable things we have said and done that have tarnished trust, upended relationships, harpooned the heart that loved us.

The root word, Mar or mas carries the energy of a generative force and now it reverberates through the theatre of politics, unearthing Boris Johnson as the winds of change howl through Westminster. As Mars trines his South Node on July 7^th Boris Johnson, the man who would be King of the World, reluctantly announces his resignation.

As tragedy turns to farce, Uranus and the North Node are currently activating Boris Johnson’s Ascendant and transiting Pluto is moving over his Midheaven making a painful square to his Moon. Karma ripens.

This is a fragile, vulnerable time for our leaders, for our home planet, for all humanity. The calm simplicity of Taurus calls us to get back into nature, to live more sustainably, to tenderly care for our earth and all living things. The fetid tail of the Scorpio South Node lures us backwards into drama and chaos, draws up those shadowy things that haunt our dream time and play out in unspeakable acts of cruelty and rage.

Between July 1^st and February 2023, Uranus travels in tandem with the North Node in Taurus, suggesting that collectively we are in for a bumpy ride. Mars joins the fray on August 1^st, amplifying dogged determination, perhaps the final push by the Russians in Ukraine and the fateful necessity for the West to take action. Mars is associated with desire, with bloodlust, and Mars makes a frustrating square to intractable Saturn on August 7-10^th August amplifying the uneasy Saturn/Uranus square which has been in force all this uneasy, unpredictable year.

Collectively this may feel like the painful bursting of a swollen abscess, and if this alignment moves over any angle or planets in our own birth chart, we will feel this energy perhaps as an intense release, the resolution of something that has been building for some time now. On August 10^th, the transiting Moon and Pluto oppose Venus, drawing us back to what comes to light on the Full Moon in Capricorn on July 13^th. “You can’t change a regime on the basis of compassion. There’s got to be something harder,” observes Nadine Gordimer.

Astrologer Liz Greene writes, “If we accept the principle of astrological ages, the collective psyche has been aligned with the Piscean/Neptunian values for the last two thousand years. Mars is the natural enemy of Neptune. Where Neptune’s longing for fusion dominates, Mars is castrated. If we create and live within a world-view which regards Neptunian values as the highest good, Mars will inevitably become the “bad guy”. We may be reminded that in myth, Mars is a self-serving tribal creature who revelled in the heat and blood of battle. No matter how spiritually attuned or selflessly loving we are, our instinctual agression is still represented by Mars in our birth chart. We can choose to project it outwards, or internalise it as an illness or as depression, but if we meet this virile, vital force within, we may have the courage to rise up rooted, claim our own potency and flourish and thrive during these challenging times.

If we surrendered to Earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making—Rilke.

Please get in touch if you would like a private astrology session, or more information about forthcoming virtual events: ingrid@trueheartwork.com

October 8, 2014 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Fragile

Every family has one. A secret that pervades the air at family gatherings like the smell of moth balls. A death, a betrayal, an imprisonment. A relative that falls from the family tree and vanishes without a trace. Secrets roll through the dust of generations like fragile tumble weeds. Sometimes they are collected and fashioned into tales that are embellished with bright beads of drama, or muted strands of omission. Sometimes they are made more colourful, more heroic, to lighten the terrifying darkness, conceal the senseless waste.

Film, literature and poetry depict the flawed hero, the Black Sheep, the Sacrificial One who becomes the Redeemer. We vicariously watch the Rebel, the circuit breaker deliver the seismic shock that topples atrophy in the family system. We rejoice in the regeneration, the potency of new growth. The BBC’s adaptation of Irish writer John Banville’s novels portrays the pervasive power of family secrets and our complex relationship with what can be told and that which must be unspoken. Gabriel Byrne in the title role of Quirke, (like Morse, we never find out his Christian name ) enters the portal of his past and attempts to untangle the dark knots of his family complexes: Affairs, addictions, misuse of power, and the redemption of Love. Sarah Polley, in her documentary Stories We Tell explores the twisted thread of secrets in her own family. She discovers that her mother and Montreal producer Harry Gulkin sequestered their love. That she was born of their hidden passion.

In Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, author Margaret Heffernan explores the subtle and pervasive ways we choose, sometimes consciously but mostly not, to remain unseeing in situations where “we could know, and should know, but don’t know because it makes us feel better not to know.”

And yet, we do know. Many of us spend much of our lives moving forwards, never daring to look back. At first we may run like the Gingerbread Man, as fast as we can, to escape the dark shadows of our inheritance. Or like Bluebeard, we keep the gruesome corpses of our memories locked away with the key that bleeds. Perhaps we stuff the dark terror of our past into a glass bottle where it floats across the sea but eventually washes up on the shores of future generations. Family secrets are intuited even by young children, unpicked, uncovered, with the best intentions by loving parents who wish to protect them from what they perceive as a dangerous truth.

Author of Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel, examines the western belief that there should be total transparency.“ In America, lying can never be an act of caring. We find it hard to accept that lying would be protective, this is an unexamined idea. In some countries, not telling, or a certain opaqueness, is an act of respect. Also, maybe the opposite of transparency isn’t intimacy, it’s aggression. People sometimes tell for their own good, as an act of aggression.”

Nations have secrets too. We turn a blind eye. Stay under the radar, in fear of reprisal, in terror of putting our lives or those of our families at risk. Like the frog in the beaker of slowly boiling water, we remain in physically or spiritually destructive environments as the temperature increases insidiously, lethal degree by degree. Often we must confront our past, choose differently, knowing that nothing will ever be the same again.

So often it is in our families we inherit secrets and lies and encounter conflicts and complexes that have ossified over many generations. Sometimes it is helpful to revisit the past. Sometimes it is not.

Joseph Marshall Lakota teacher, writer and story teller tells how he would go out walking with his grandfather, sometimes for miles. “He had this curious little habit of stopping and then he would turn me around, grab me by my shoulders and he would say, Grandson, look back at the way we came. So I would. I finally asked him, Grandpa, why are you making me look back? He said, Because, Grandson, one of these times I’m going to send you down this trail by yourself and if you don’t remember the way you came, you will be lost. To me, that is the greatest lesson I ever learned about history and about the past. Our past makes us who we are, makes us what we are.”

Like racehorses, some of us are destined to be weighted more heavily from the start. Perhaps in looking back, we learn how to walk bravely in the dark. We may glimpse in the stories, the artifacts, the letters and perhaps the old photographs, the strength, the creativity, the courage of those who have walked before us. In their pain we discover the portal to our fragility. In the opaqueness of their secrets, the bright spark of Divinity is concealed in the soft folds of their humanity.

Sting and Paul Simon, Fragile